Despite all the pedigrees and continuities, there is also something radically new about the Abu Ghraib pictures. This novelty does not lie in the acts depicted (for we can be sure that far worse things have happened in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, before and after the fall of Saddam Hussein): It lies, rather, in the pictures' intent. Many commentators have argued that what is depicted in the pictures is not torture but abuse. They are, I think, technically right. Torture implies the use of extreme means in order to achieve certain ends. It is clear from the Abu Ghraib pictures that the perpetrators of the abuse had no specific end in mind. It is as if they were making the prisoners act out an idea of torture, not as a means but as an end in itself. It is as if the jailors were saying to the prisoners: There is no particular purpose in doing this other than to teach you who you are and what your place is in relation to us.

The war in Iraq has often been described in the language of the classroom: It is said to be intended to provide lessons in democracy and to teach the ways of freedom and so on. The meaning of the photographs is also framed by this pedagogical context: It is as if they were made to illustrate, for the benefit of Third Worlders, the reality of the unspoken relationship between prisons and parliaments. This is where their horror lies: not just in the acts performed before the camera but in the fact that they are communicative acts, evidently intended to educate, to train. That is probably why the soldiers felt no hesitation in taking and distributing the pictures; they too were sure, no doubt, that the purity of their ends was a validation of the means they had chosen.

If there is any useful lesson to be drawn from this, it is that now, as ever, means cannot be separated from ends: They are the same thing. In the Clinton years there were many liberal interventionists who believed that the nobility of their ends somehow justified the use of any means at hand (unilateralism, the flouting of international law and so on). Today the tune has changed, and some liberal interventionists have begun to speak of the dangers of a foreign policy that is overly moralistic. This is to misplace the blame for everything that has gone wrong. Addressing the question of human betterment was never the problem: The problem began with the privileging of ends over means. It is because of this that the liberal interventionists have been so neatly tied into a knot by the neoconservatives: Having failed to address the question of the appropriate means, they have been unable to contest the appropriation of their ends. By way of contrast, this is also one of the reasons why such figures as Richard Falk and Noam Chomsky are so remarkable: because of their insistence on scrutinizing means as well as ends.

The anniversary of Abu Ghraib should serve as a reminder of what happens when the declared ends of a project are utterly incommensurate with the means: The means become the end, enacted over and over again.

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